There are many ways for people to express opinions, submit feedback, or otherwise comment on various products, services, events, or other happenings. For example, with the popularity of Web 2.0 applications, an increasing number of people provide opinion data for others to consume. In addition to traditional forms of communication, many people contribute such opinion data via online forums, web blogs, and customer reviews, which provide a great wealth of information. Customer opinions are particularly valuable because they are often perceived to provide practical information about a subject, thus often being absent of puffery that may be used by companies when discussing their products and services. In addition, customer opinions typically include both positive and negative aspects of products and services which result in diverse opinion data.
It is often difficult to navigate through the vast amount of opinion data made available to customers, such as via the Internet. For example, a particular product may have hundreds of reviews, of which only a summary may be of particular interest to another customer. It is important to be able to sort through this information to organize people's opinions and perform analysis on the opinion data. This may result in better understanding of the wealth of information that makes up the opinion data.
One way to sort through the opinion data is to have humans manually categorize each entry into a number of logical categories that helps customers navigate though the data. For example, opinion data may be categorized as being a positive or negative opinion data. In addition, the opinion may be related to a particular product or service category and possibly further linked to subcategories. However, human categorization is very time consuming and expensive. Another way to categorize information is by requiring the author of the review to provide category information when the opinion data is generated. Although this may work very well in some instances, such as by asking a customer to rank the product (e.g., via stars, a numerical value, etc.) when submitting a customer review, this may not be available for all sources opinion data, such as forums, blogs, etc.